Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity
support.google.com
support.google.com
I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the linked forum.
If it was the entire account, something really needs to be done with Google to force them to make these kind of actions as narrow as possible. They can really disrupt your life with a broad account lock.
What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.
Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had).
Google only examines files that were shared with other users or were made accessible to others through a shareable link. Which, sorta makes sense, because that's how a lot of people shared illegal content or streamed videofiles (sort of like a personal youtube). And if you don't share those files with anyone and just keep it as your personal cloud drive, I don't think they examine it.
>why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android?
Google is essentially your mail service (gmail), video platform (youtube), cloud storage (gdrive), and tons of other completely separate services. In physical world, violation of terms of one of the services leads you to being banned only from that service, unless criminal law gets involved. If the law gets involved, then the law can get you banned from using quite a lot of services. But until the law makes the judgement, being banned from a grocery store cannot automatically and without any recourse get you banned from your bank, your car insurance, your mail service, and many other things.
I guess my point on the latter is that no private business (but law) should be able to prevent a person from using multiple completely unrelated vital services. Here are a few scenarios I thought of that would illustrate how it would work:
* An airline banning you for being an asshole on a flight by adding you to a denylist used by other airlines as well? That's congruent with my idea, because it is all within the same service (airlines), and it won't be done automatically.
*A judge completely blocking you from flying by locking you up for participating in terrorist activities? Sure, because the law did it after an investigation and followed proper legal processes.
*Wells Fargo closing down your account because you were an asshole at Kroger when shopping for groceries and got banned from that store? That would be crazy talk.
The only difference between the google scenario and the kroger+Wells Fargo scenario is that kroger+WF are not a part of the same company. But would it be acceptable for WF to close down your account if WF and Kroger were a part of the same parent company? In my opinion, it wouldn't be ok.
Your argument makes sense, and I share your feelings on an emotional level, but at this point, the whole argument can be reduced to "sharing video files streamed from google drive is an equivalent of hosting a video on youtube, so the same rules apply", and that's hard to beat.
If you want to store whatever material you want for personal consumption, you are welcome to. But if you enable sharing, that's when all those extra rules start applying, because you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google, and DMCA strikes and other stuff will apply just the same.
Similarly, you can make backup copies of a DVD movie for yourself by burning them onto writeable DVDs. The legality of it is dubious due to copyright law being plain awful at times, but you won't get prosecuted for that if you truly had it only for personal backup reasons. The second you start distributing those DVDs in massive amounts to people, you start inviting a pretty legal trouble to your doorstep.
Mind you, I absolutely disagree with the ban of both the historical footage, as well as the whole google account just because of that footage. However, I do believe that making video public via a shareable link or otherwise puts it in the territory where content rules similar to youtube might get reasonably applied.
Then logically, why should it be available ad free either?
I don't think so.
Lets say you and I opened a joint safe deposit box at the bank to share USB drives together with movies on it. If the bank found out, they wouldn't be required to drill it open and scan the drive to make sure none of the movies were copyrighted. This is google drilling open the safe deposit box because someone shared the keys, and they think there may be a movie they don't like there.
Legally, you are 100% correct. The law doesn't require the host to do anything until a DMCA strike is received. But YouTube has its own rules, which is fully legal as well, as long as they are more restrictive than the law (e.g., establishments prohibiting alcohol inside are allowed, even though alcohol is legal; establishments allowing crack cocaine usage inside are not allowed, because crack cocaine is illegal).
And YouTube decided to take proactive approach here. The reasoning for why doesn't matter to the point at hand. The fact of the matter is, YouTube took a stricter approach to DMCA moderation and tends to not always wait until the video receives and actual DMCA strike.
I actually think that not making a distinction between publishing to the world and sharing with a small group of people is the biggest source of unreasonableness in all of these debates.
When I'm interacting and sharing with a few people I know or who I just met, I expect companies and governments to stay out of it (unless there is a criminal investigation overseen by a judge). I don't think that's unreasonable at all. It used to be the status quo until not very long ago.
Everything from political activity to copyrights can be discussed in a far more sensible way if we make that distinction. As soon as we erase that distinction, which has sometimes happened because it's the default with some technologies, everything becomes essentially unsolvable.
E.g, I don't want to defend the right to anonymity of someone who directly and systematically influences entire populations just because I expect to be allowed to do the equivalent of talking to three strangers in a pub without showing ID.
Google knows how many different people access a particular piece of shared content. They should just set a reasonable threshold before unleashing their crude algorithms. 2 is not a reasonable threshold. How about 200?
But in this case it's just that walmart zoomed in on your notebook with a security camera, saw some arabic scribbles about allah on a tank drawing you were sharing with your friend, and decided you were a terrorist. Sure, they absolutely should toss you out the store if they think you are one, but they shouldn't have been zooming in your notebook in the first place.
Also, I get there are some black and white cases here. But there's plenty of grey also. I imagine a lot of terrorist videos aren't posted by terrorists, but rather by some disenfranchised/angry person who hasn't done anything illegal.
Unfortunately, google clearly has stated they think terroristic acts are happening. Once you indicate that you believe a counterparty is engaging in terrorist acts, you mustn't support them. Quite a few people have gone for prison for a very long time because a fed or informant who had zero interest in actually carrying out a terrorist act, made someone believe they were. And all the prosecutor needs to show is that Google _thought_ they were aiding someone making terroristic acts, and the prison sentences could be lengthy.
Remember the legal system doesn't have much room for nuance when it comes to criminal conspiracy. Even if somebody else gives you all the tools to do something horrible and eggs you on to do it, you are responsible if you make any act whatsoever towards what you believe will have that end, even if the person egging you on is actually a fed who knows all along the act isn't meant to ever happen and in fact you were only presented with the idea that an act could happen on false pretense so you could be tricked into going to jail.
And this brings me back to my original thought, which is that google is pretty dumb for even putting themselves in the position where they have a very dumb system for deciding if they're dealing with terrorist material. Because it opens them up to huge liability that they wouldn't have had if they simply allow their users to exist in privacy.
Terrorism is an INCREDIBLY SERIOUS allegation. It should be dealt with by law enforcement and the courts. And the penalties for _false_ accusations, which is exactly what this is, should be severe as well. It can be life-ruining.
Terrorism should not just be dealt with through the courts. If you think someone is committing violence against others your responsibility is to shut down all support of that person, you mustn't aid them in any way. There's no requirement that private entities wait for the courts before stopping commerce with suspected terrorists. If you are google, that means completely locking out all accounts that you identify as involved in terrorism.
The supreme court has held that when making statements of public concern, you haven't committed libel if you are acting without malice. It's pretty clear google wasn't acting with malice here, and that it is a great public concern if someone is actually amassing armored vehicles to use against others. And just because someone is a terrorist, doesn't mean you should or can act through the courts. If google believes someone is acting against non-US nationals in a foreign country, then there's very little the US courts could pragmatically do about it other than order entities in the US not to support them. Of course if evidence did emerge that google flagged that terrorist activity was happening, and they continued supporting that activity, I don't think that would look favorably during any prosecution.
Which, yet again, brings me to my original point, which is that google shouldn't even be putting themselves in the position to scan private data and open themselves up to the liability of having invade privacy and to suspect someone is engaging in crimes.
"If you think". What if you're wrong?
So if you're wrong, you merely didn't engage in commerce with someone you believe to be a terrorist. There's nothing wrong or illegal about that. The agreement for free services by google doesn't mean google can't end the service at any time, and I'd bet the boiler plate for any paid service has a pressure release valve to end the service if google merely suspects you of engaging in illegal activity. In short, Google owes you nothing, and they're not your slave to provide you service despite believing you're a criminal.
A legal team of 1,000+ at google is betting that you're wrong. I have a feeling they came to a pretty logical decision that liability of aiding someone flagged of terrorist activity is greater than liability of shutting down someone to whom you owe nothing.
Sony did this to me, they blocked my son account for 2 months,no reason why or a way to appeal. The good part is that I now have a reason to not buy Sony products again, the bad part is that until it happens to you , you will think that there are millions of users and only few are affected by this so for sure it will not happen to you.
>What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.
The solution I advocate for is they shouldn't be looking at our data. I don't want them evaluating who is a terrorist or who isn't, because as soon as they do that they need to take action on that information or be liable for failing to do so.
But I think you have found a very good solution with Sony, and maybe we should apply this to google and simply not use their service rather than get upset because they've chosen not to support those they think are terrorists. Again google is not your slave that must perform a service for you.
If you get banned from the entirety of Amazon marketplace by harassing sellers in the gardening equipment department, that seems fair. If you get your AWS account banned for doing the same thing that has nothing to do with AWS, that's a different story. One thing is a consumer goods store, the other is a cloud service provider.
Can you really say with a straight face that once google thinks they have a terrorist, they should just go on supporting that person in any way whatsoever? There can be very serious penalties for knowingly aiding terroristic acts (even if it turns out it was say a "harmless" fed or informant instead of an actual terrorist).
He was banned from all properties owned the malls parent company.
They say that they process all of your data:
> To provide services like spam filtering, virus detection, malware protection and the ability to search for files within your individual account, we process your content.
They also have some weirdly specific claim about advertising, which I don’t trust bc it sounds like they’re mincing words:
> We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—including Drive—for advertising purposes, period.
in your analogy the grocery store also has a gun shop next door they own, you're in the grocery store and they decide that you are buying something to poison someone so they don't let you, you go next door to the gun shop where they say 'hey, customer 2214 potential murderer of course you can buy the gun!' You buy the gun and go kill the person you were intending to kill.
When the law gets involved the company owning the grocery store and gun store will find it has a lot of liability.
Basically anything where you think the law will get involved and have to make a determination will mean you will have to shut down all services.
Notice the law getting involved banning is of course different than the you were an asshole banning.
on edit: I of course think it's ridiculous that this account got banned, but that doesn't change the fact that the argument put forward here about wait for the law to make determination just isn't going to fly in any situation, and think about it if someone was a terrorist, got banned in service X but used service Y to coordinate their big attack that killed thousands would you really be sitting here saying service Y was right not to ban them? Maybe you would, but the law and general public opinion probably wouldn't.
So I assume it's the entire Google account.
The closest thing to ours is private keys for onion host routing which are addresssed as the public key derived from the private key tailed with dot-onion (https://pubkey.onion). And most software works with Tor our of the box via torify. Tested with self-signed HTTPS and XMPP and others have with email.
Tor may not be anonymous, but identity ownership is a killer use case. 2022 the year of the onion? I can commit to wrapping all my things going forward.
Less Google for me, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
if you want free there's always https://rclone.org/- to keep things affordable for those who can afford to buy only a few devices
- to extract as much money as possible from those who can afford to buy multiple devices
It’s a pricing strategy. That doesn’t have to reflect what it costs them at all, but ideally should match what it’s worth to the customer (if it doesn’t, they either leave money on the table or don’t get sales)
If I can't trust cloud storage, I might just buy another external hard drive (or a nas) and backup my data there.
Trusting ANYONE ELSE to manage your property is always a bad idea!
Google should be legally required to either provide a phone number to call, or make the Takeout feature always available regardless of account bans.
Fun fact! The word “libertarian” was self consciously co-opted by the libertarian right in the 1960s by Murray Rothbard, who viewed that co-option as an important part of his war with the left.
This isn't new, by the way. Companies have had their way since the advent of the telephone, it was just in the shadows since the internet wasn't around and we didn't have companies attaching their brand name to every consumer-unfriendly act committed.
Your capitalist reflex might be to dismiss self-organized, user-oriented coops... but they seem to provide better service and support than most commercial services i've dealt with.
It's just wrong to trick people in to trusting a service with their data and then yanking it with no support contact.
It took me 4 weeks to sign up for a service which requires few business details and proof of a domain by form of an invoice.
For a reason I don’t understand, it has no bearing on the rest of the registration process whatsoever, I just gave them proof of some unrelated random domain I own.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/
I had a problem where my spouse’s employer’s Health Savings Account custodian (PNC bank in this case) was simply giving us the run around on charging a fee that was not on their fee schedule, which the employees of PNC even acknowledged was an error, but no one could get in touch with a person with enough power to fix the problem.
I submitted a request on the CFPB website asking them to look into it and within 48 hours I had a boss call me from PNC bank to confirm that my error was resolved and provided me her email address and phone number if there were further issues.
Trump did neuter the CPFB though, but hopefully Biden will bring it back:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-01-11/column-cfp...
Honestly not sure if you're joking about this.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=meatbag&tbm=bks
At least partially covered by GDPR for Europeans.
Why should there be megacorporations or nation-states to begin with? They seem to be causing more problems (massive inequality, environmental destruction) than they are solving.
I believe they're referencing Facebook's role in the Myanmar coup: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654
(reference for "600" as the death toll: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56703416)
Think of cloud accounts like any other form of backup. Two is one, one is none.
Hard drives die, cloud services come and go. No backup is forever.
> Your content is safe, private, and never used for ad personalization
> And Drive is cloud-native, which eliminates the need for local files and minimizes risk to your devices.
> Your important work, files, and precious memories are protected by our industry-leading security. You can rest easy knowing that the things you care about are stored safely in the cloud.
If Google markets a product in a specific way I don't think it's unreasonable to criticize Google when they fail to live up to that marketing.
At a previous job, we had a forensic image of a compromised laptop stored in G-Drive. Google blocked access to it because of the malware on the disk. No "no, really, this is important and I need to download it, I acknowledge the risks" button, nothing. Good thing the person who uploaded it hadn't deleted the original copy yet.
Im writing this from an android phone. It is not de-googled per se, but uses a replacement for every single Google service (files, books, maps, search, movies, ...). Yes I pay money for those replacements, but God its good to not my life in the hand of a overzealous ML algorithm.
I'd still be scrambling around a bit to fix stuff if Google banned me, but I'd at least have copies of the most important things.
I believe only by empowering smaller, user-friendly providers (eg. hosting coops) can we actually change the situation.
Google was better when they first got going, but has since declined well below Mapquest.
Of course the data can only be shown if someone adds it; with OMaps you can contribute for example `opening_hours` and the pub which is non-existent in OpenStreetMap ;)
eg If you don't use photos or storage then zero risk that they will cause you to lose your gmail account.
Google drive and photos are my primary data copy and the .tgz dumps are my backup.
I had Apple lock me out of iTunes, App Store, Mac Store, ... - for an entire month, if not more - alleging that I spammed others with my iMessage account.
The fact is that I never, ever used iMessage! I used only WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS.
In every support call, I would hear them say the same thing. I would tell them that I never used iMessage, let alone spam others. But, they would say, some users marked your iMessage account as spamming. I would ask them for proof, with iMessage records; they would say they cannot disclose that!
After that experience, I simply moved off iPhone to a Pixel.
I still have an MBP for work purposes, but I needed to create a different AppleID.
Summary: This can happen with any company!
"If storing or distributing content related to terrorism for an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purpose be mindful to provide enough information so viewers understand the context."
So a random photo of a ute with the ISIS logo on the side might be a violation if you don't also write some commentary explaining what it's about and assuring everyone that you aren't promoting or celebrating terrorism. But where? in another file? How will a person with a link to the photo find that?
Now everything it does has turned into dark patterns. Google's #1 revenue generator Ads (formerly AdWords) now uses dark patterns to trick advertisers into spending more. For example, most of the recommendations make a user's campaign spend more money while not getting results. Many unwary users ignore these recommendations without realizing that Google added a setting that by default is on that automatically implements all of Google's recommendations after 14 days of wait time. These recommendations are implemented without the users consent or even knowledge. Even if a user turns off that setting, the recommendations appear everywhere throughout the interface with enticing "Apply All" buttons that are easily clicked on accidentally.
What a total nightmare of evil Google has become.
"be mindful to provide enough information so viewers understand the context"
and hyperbolized it, to put it mildly, into: "you are forced to write some commentary explaining what it's about and assuring everyone that you aren't..."
Context is the opposite of "an explicit statement spelling it all out."
Maybe I post photos of a vacation trip somewhere there was a car with an ISIS logo on it. The information and context they are talking about would be "2020 Vacation photos" for the album title and it being accompanied by pictures of sunsets, my partner, birbs, etc. that make it plainly obvious it just is a random car in my vacation photos.
Just because the context is very explicit does not mean that it's not context. Is it additional information that clarifies the primary info? Then it's context.
The title / description that says something like "Study of the use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region", which is what you'd do anyway if it were for public consumption?
Don't be obtuse.
"Study of the use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"
is context but
"use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"
is promotion? Clear as mud.
Remember when ISIS started showing beheadings on Youtube and people thought it should be allowed to inform the public of how horrible they were? Turns out it was actually promotion and helped recruit foreign fighters.
My concern with actions like this is that there is rarely a clear line between what is acceptable and what's not, instead decisions are made in a highly political manner either by companies themselves or more authoritarian governments. So the question I have here is whether Google is simply respecting and enforcing national laws against owning illegal terrorist materials or are they making their own decisions about what is and isn't terrorist material?
IMO this just touches on a wider problem that in many countries simply owning concern books without a good excuse is illegal. To be charitable I suspect Google doesn't have much of an option here. If the government has classified something as terrorist material, even if Google disagrees with them doing so, Google probably should still respect national laws on not allow that material to be stored, or worse, distributed on their platform.
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/127021326/google-has...
If you do pay for Google’s services via G Suite then you do get instant human support.
moot point anyways, as google is not (yet) in the business of essential services. they can hand out literal shit and it's totally fine.
It would have to be a major emergency to warrant that, food-wise. Under normal circumstances, no danger food.
> moot point anyways, as google is not (yet) in the business of essential services. they can hand out literal shit and it's totally fine.
Google is more like the store giving out free samples. It's not essential at all but it definitely has to be safe.
Huh? They paid with their data.
https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms.html
> If Google becomes aware that Customer's or any End User's use of the Services violates the AUP, Google will notify Customer and request that Customer correct the violation. If Customer fails to correct the violation within 24 hours of Google's request, then Google may Suspend all or part of Customer's use of the Services until the violation is corrected. Suspension of the Services may include removal or unsharing of content that violates the AUP.
I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out of it. We certainly don't like this state of affairs, but that is the world many of us have created.
I'm honestly thinking I'm going to have to backup my entire G-Drive externally and wipe it (for the security of my Google account). I mean, who knows what will trigger the deletion of your Google account these days... I guess the storage I pay for is just for e-mails.
It’s enough to make me anxious between backups: at least with spinning rust-drives we can transplant the platters and controllers (separately, even!) while SSD hardware recovery is almost unheard of.
though the ssds i use are for backup and arent used very often for writing... i wonder if that makes a difference?
I've never had even the cheapest mwave or microcenter special ssd die. Sata or nvme m.2, nothing.
I also haven't had a spindle die in 15 years, ever since I started letting them sleep and using UPS to smooth out power.
That noise you hear is me knocking on wood pretty frantically.
Two or more external-DDs, copied regularly per how much they are willing to spend time and lose data. One stored in some other place if possible.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...
You really want offline backups. Never recommend “not having to back it up regularly”.
RAID is not a substitute for rotating backups.
uhmm... there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread. And the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader.
Fine, then s/article/post/ in what I said.
> the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader
I agree; I'm simply pointing out that if you are going to try to execute a project that requires a lot of digital storage of important data, you should be tech savvy, or collaborate with someone who is. You certainly should not expect a free service like Google Drive to be a secure, reliable data store for your only copies of important data.
I think multiply redundant back-ups get expensive, but one external hard drive with scads of space is cheap (at least from the perspective of someone who grew up when you measured space in MB). It won't provide you the security against data failure, but it will provide some recourse for when the cloud provider yanks your data.
But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it.
That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives.
Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.
We need to stop pretending that software, including free-as-in-beer SaaS, doesn’t have an implied warranty. It does. The implied warranty in Google Drive is that “we’ll host your files for you”. Google screwed-up (an “honest” mistake, it pains me to say) but a consumer advocate (the FTC in the US?) should be going after Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty.
The lack of support, however, is not - and is part of Google’s business model.
Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.
Host locally and RENT backup servers in couple of places. Those cost peanuts and are highly reliable.
No one who works for a powerful entity likes admitting they are more or less powerless to daily statments they see on here.
It's like how anyone with tech awareness watches the goal posts keep moving.. Yes, I know alternatives and mitigation and ECT.
Power is a fickle mistress.
Is there any "grandparent friendly" way to do this today?
Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.
For paying private customers yes I'd day fine but in most of these cases in ruling to bet the "free" 1GB was more than enough
No, but give them a punitive fine (on the order of a percentage of their daily average profits) for failing to live-up to their own expectations set in their own advertising.
Legitimate companies will have no problem with that. Scum that wants to lure users in (to capture their personal data) but doesn't even have the decency to hold up their end of the bargain will have to reconsider whether they still want to provide such a service.
Google Drive is not a "cloud storage service". You're not a paying customer of Google and you have no leverage with them at all. Putting your only copy of any data that you can't afford to lose on Google Drive is just asking for trouble.
> Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty
There is no implied warranty for a service that's being given to you for free and for which you have no customer agreement or contract with Google. If you want a warranty, express or implied, you need to be a paying customer.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...
Would periodically swap out drives and store the backup ones at a relatives house.
Would keep it disconnected from the external internet other than for pulling in updates.
But this makes me nervous.
Synology is a good compromise for ease of use and being able to actually set it up the way you want and need it. I have been using them for a few years and I'm happy with them. You actually get a good range of options for setting it up securely. I'm much more concerned about my router being taken over in some way as it doesn't get security updates and there is not much you can do with it.
And yes, I use it amongst other things for local backups. But then still back up to Dropbox and Google Drive from the NAS and other devices. And to external hard drives to swap around. It doesn't make me use cloud storage less, but I'm a lot less concerned about losing access with having everything local as well.
(I also don't recommend exposing your NAS directly to the internet. They frequently make doing so attractive with the ability to run addons like file sharing or "private cloud" services. If you must, run them in a VM on the NAS and isolate the VM from everything else on your network. And keep up with patches.)
You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a lot more to maintain.
Symnology supports rsync, ssh, scp, custom docker images, etc. you can probably run Borg server on it, although I have not looked into that.
So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I own one. Do you?
A few months ago, I decided to migrate to my new laptop by restoring a backup from the old one , just as a way to test the DS216j backups. I found:
a) I was on an old backup solution of them, and they had migrated to something new. I had a hard time to find the old backup software's installer to do the restore.
b) The old backup was good enough to restore individual files, but had no real way to do a full restore. It seems they thought I'd click on each individual file, even if there are hundreds of thousands in my home folder. I believe there was an option for zipping a folder, but it just timed out.
c) Their site had great documentation for telling me about how to do backups, but I could not find anything for the I-urgently-need-a-full-restore use case. Maybe I overlooked it, or their new software is better documented.
Now all the data was safely on the NAS, and I think I could scrape it out with a few days work, but none of the above would be fun to find out in the middle of an emergency. I've since thrown their backup software out and replaced it with a custom rsync to the NAS. At least I know how to deal with that when the full cow farm production hits the turbofan.
Drive alternative is simple enough with "cp -r" and your own bucket. For something like, Gmail and other services, it gets complicated.
If a service is free, you're the commodity that is being bundled and sold.
If a service is paid for, you're a Premium Commodity with Money that is being bundled and sold.
> f you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data
In many jurisdictions, absolutely not.
A moral or ethical responsibility, maybe. A legal or financial one? Not under our current system, unfortunately. And corporations are not ethical actors.
Just to be clear, I'm not victim-blaming here. It is abhorrent what has happened to this person and to many like them. This is why education about avoiding snake oil I believe is essential in the school system. Economics courses should devote a full module to identifying snake-oil claims and inherent risks of "something for nothing" swindles, which Google Drive is a classic modern example of.
Lots of parents take a photo of their child having a bath or something similar at least in Europe/Asia and it's clearly of non-sexual nature. Now, how does the Apple algo know that?
I'm generally curious: Have you tried to contact Google before about any kind of issue? It took me like a day or so to chat with an actual person the last time I had an issue.
Apple also only recieves a DB of hashes and so have no way to verify that they're only scanning for CSAM and not other "undesirable" content.
When Google AI blocks an account, why don't they offer a window of using Google Takeout to get a .zip of all their stuff?
due process is "the state isn't allowed to do things to you unless they're in the law"
so like, a king would just make up criminal punishments. oh, you stole a painting? four years. THE PAINTING OF MY MOM? THIRTY YEARS, NO, FORTY.
because of due process, that isn't legal here
due process only applies to the application of the law, by the state
Daily reminder that online stored files should be encrypted (no bot would have found anything it doesnt like)
Daily reminder that google is know for this and should not be used unless for a third backup or something.
Daily reminder that big tech is the biggest threat to democracy we face today, even bigger than some conspiracy Q theorists LARPing in the capitol.
Daily reminder that if we simply enforced our current anti-trust laws, we could disassemble the bulk of these companies, all the meanwhile distributing the opportunities and improving the economy for all.
If Microsoft deserved it in the 90s, Google sure as hell does today.
Big Tech also organized and profited from that. Most of this nonsense originated on Facebook.
Encrypted data is too much of a pain because it breaks cross platform integrations. I mostly upload files via my ipad and phone which are unable to encrypt the data. It also prevents you from previewing things without downloading the full file first.
You get a mail sometime in the future and after receiving it you have to turn around and download multiple chunks, log in for each of them and do it quickly before they disappear.
Gives Google, fb, twitter, et al time to ban the bots (in first 30 days of an account life), while still protecting users from ever expansive tech cos.
But anyhow, people should be well aware cloud providers do use AI systems and they will make mistakes, so you should:
1: have multiple redundant backups, seriously this is a no-brainer, AI or no even Google can lose data if a storage device dies. Depending on how important the data is you might consider as many backups as you can manage.
2: encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. If you store even so much as a text file unencrypted you're making a mistake. Use archives, double compressed, use the myraid of tools out there to ensure your files can't be read by anyone but you and who you decide to give the key to.
Is this more work? Absolutely, but at the end of the day regulations mean Google need to scan content, and they will have a false positive match, and then it goes on HN and magically Google restore the data.
I hope they get the data back but sometimes being burnt is actually a lesson in remembering best practice, why oh why your only copy of family photos are on one user hostile data-mining platform is beyond me, but it's a terrible idea.
>Google Drive which I used to back up all of my data
“back up” rather than “only copy”.
"so google disabled my account that i used to make my folder with educational content on Palestine, i.e the drive folder that i had linked in my bio"
If you're trying to de-Google your life, what is a sane replacement for Google Docs in a collaborative team environment where you can have some confidence that you won't lose all your assets?
Well, fuck me.
(gotta do everything myself, but I can go to sleep now :D)
Well done here, I'm the asshole. :)
Yep, scum of the earth. /s
They are. They don't even know how to pirate.
The best pirates would never use free open source solutions. They'd just take whatever corporate solution that's the flavor of the day and then use that with anxiety inducing cracks that will give your antivirus a heart attack.
Not everyone is a techie that can switch from google's friendly UI, and transfer everything to another safer service that operates differently.
In this day and age, if you’re lucky emails exist, but due to discovery, etc many entities just purge everything. Bad news, this era will be a black hole for future generations to understand. Good news is that the idiocy of this era will be toned down.
It should be prohibited by law for cloud service providers to snoop around in other people's data without a warrant, no matter whether that snooping is automated or done by humans.
Especially given the name of the device...
I don't see any alternative, but just wanted to make that point.
I originally had over 200 books, all read, gathering dust so I gave them away. They took up space and attention and were a pain in the ass when I had to move house.
As for the convenience, I do a lot of hiking and it’s not much fun dragging two books from the expanse series with you versus a kindle in a ziplock bag.
I have physical copies and PDFs for technical books and reference material though. And a lot of text files.
The topic of this discussion is cloud-based censorship.
tell yourselves a decade ago: everything is streamed, if something doesn't meet the most up-to-date social guidelines created by a mob of microbloggers it's removed from a storefront or completely kicked off most of the internet, oh and privacy? too radical!
clown world
I don't think I had the option to appeal, but they've also not actually terminated the VM yet, and I'm up to date on my billing according to their system so... shrug
Someone pushed a billing update without testing it properly first and it got confused, most likely. I expect a "Please ignore our last email..." sort of message tomorrow.
Actually, now that I look... https://status.cloud.google.com/
> [Under Investigation] Customers may receive "Payment failed" notifications.
> Error Message: “Your payment information could not be processed. Visit the payment overview page to make sure your payment information is up to date and to pay any outstanding charges.”
I wonder if it's more widespread and you got caught in the same thing.
Search quality has been deteriorating, services shut down, quotas lowered etc.
Wonder if they manage to break this cycle. I'd kind of of so given all the pension fund money that is invested into it.
This is an unfortunate incident, but IMO hardly as egregious as other commenters are making it out to be. A false positive for literal videos of terrorist vehicles does not seem at all unreasonable, and yet HN has given it less than 24 hours to be resolved before blasting it to the top of the front page.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Your account has been re-enabled."
https://support.google.com/drive/thread/127021326/google-has...
That's only the icon.
It's just somebody else's computer.
_Not yours_ is the keyword.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/war_thunder_classifie...
>Hungary-based game developer Gaijin Entertainment found themselves in a tactically difficult position last week when a user of their combat simulator War Thunder tried to win an online argument by sharing classified documents in the company's game forums.
Maybe checksums of that document are circulated to cloud providers for censorship purposes.
Obviously it’s always sad to see such a great amount of work go to waste, but at what point are we just going to start blaming people like that who are just careless with their data.
Don’t use a cloud you don’t have total control over for something that you absolutely need control over. At the very least don’t use fucking google.
Most normal people wouldn’t consider using Google Drive as being careless with there data. They would actually considering it being smart as Google is one of the largest tech companies.
Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a minute. People who have these kids of hobbies do it because it’s their passion and a lot of times, the best ones at least, don’t have a lot of disposable income to spend on said hobby.
Cause they think it will never happen to them, until it does...
Don’t host your important shit on Google!
It’s pretty much the worst place you can use as a backup service.
The scale of some things has forced people to use non humane flagging, and to comply with some tyrannical government requests. The best solution? NAS it or use E2EE providers only.
Dear Everyone, Buy a USB stick and keep some copies of your important stuff in your own possession.
Google Drive is not a backup of your data. We need to help people get to know this - I keep telling this to friends all the time, hardly anyone listens.
Bring it.
Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someone who can fit it. That isn't a support model.
That said, Google does ha reputation for this shit, especially on their free plans, so, you should definitely keep that in mind when storing data on Google Drive.
While it does make it harder to share things directly, its well worth the hassle
Maybe the laws should actually protect us, what the hell do we pay taxes for
$2/mo or $20/yr
PS: I tend to avoid google services, but google workplace is too damn superior
“Google is robbing me of my money by banning my access to the account im paying for” should give quick responses
All done entirely through a text chat.
I hope MS customer support is better…
I definitely understand the sentiment and curious if you researched options before making this switch?
eg I had to fix a domain issue, albeit a domain issue caused by some stupid google stuff, and was connected to helpful competent people within a minute or two. Peers have similar experiences.
The paying stuff is fine.
The choice between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace should mostly be a matter of taste.
Google Workspace is very straightforward and largely offers better finish and UX. I personally dislike Google's material design and find myself confused by it, but most people seem fine with it.
M365 Business Standard on the other hand is arguably a better deal if you value the macOS and Windows versions of Microsoft's office apps. The UI isn't always good and the web versions suck, but everything is also very flexible and intended to scale to almost everything the IT dept of a Fortune 500 companies with tricky compliancy requirements might require to control a fleet of Windows machines.
The "gOoGle pRoVIDeS nO sUPPoRt" narrative is only about their free offerings. Paying customers get stellar support, at least in my experience.
I agree with this really in relation to every cloud provider. If your business continuity and data are important, there should be a plan for how to keep the lights on if a provider through malice or incompetence stops playing nice. The google specific problem is they are into so much stuff that its not just a question of not using them, you also have to consider what happens when your emails are flagged as spam our you're delisted from search, etc
(Note to self: stop giving feedback on Maps routing. You never know.)
Leave your phone at home if your are going to protest, no matter what or where you are protesting.
Briar* is a great app to communicate securely, even during an Internet blackout over Bluetooth.
In addition to that, you should frequently take a backup of your Gmail emails[3], then in case your account is locked you can use the exported mbox[4] archive, and import it in Thunderbird, this works reasonably[5] well, e.g. recently I had to find an airline ticket from 10 years ago which I had originally received in Gmail, and it took just a few seconds to find it in Thunderbird.
[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/21289?hl=en&co=GENIE....
[2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
[5] Thunderbird's search is not as good as Gmail's, but not bad either, I find it does the job for me.
So you can have an occasional annoyance but it's not that common.
When I get a new IP (e.g. because I'm upgrading to a newer machine) first I check my IP against a list of antispam filters (I don't want to advertise any of those services, but a quick internet search will show you where you can check, most services have a free tier), if it turns out that the IP has got a bad reputation, I just get a new one instead of trying to whitelist it.
The only time that my email got bounced, that IP was not "clean", it had been blocked by one of the filters but I thought "oh I will just whitelist it on that one filter". I should have generated a new one instead.
One more thing that some people might not know: with all spam filters, if your email is caught by the filter, you will get a message, it's not like you don't know if the email has been delivered or not.
You will see something like "Your message could not be delivered - The mail system [host, ip] refused to talk to me: [reason, e.g. spam]"
I still don't feel like going traipsing around minefields. I'm sure there's a benefit from tying together all Google services - for me, it just keeps me away from most of them. And I even pay for Google One.
you would think that paying for it would translate into a slightly better level of customer care. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Google. I pay for YouTube premium and I had my fair share on unanswered issues. Not sure about the other services though, YouTube is the only Google product I still use and I have a separate account only for that. Hopefully Google One turns out to be better than YouTube Premium!
Google flagged our main event site as a phishing site during a large event that was lasting multiple weeks. No matter how many load tests you do, always have contingency for Google.
TDLR: Even if you DONT USE GOOGLE as YOUR CLOUD provider, always be aware of its impacts on your customers/busisness!
Beyond that, it's a damn shame startups keep choosing Google for Google Plus or GSuite or Workhorse or whatever the fuck it's called now. The winning move is to not play with them.
An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR.
Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.
I'll get comfortable.
Except I believe that there’s a deeper cause here, the misalignment between the interests of the actual users and the company to whom the users aren’t actually a source of revenue except by numbers that can be shown to advertisers and investors. (Further down this goes to our expectation of free service; it was all fun and beta at first but it turned out to be a trap.)
Importantly, providing human service will address a symptom but not eliminate said misalignment—it’ll keep manifesting itself.
That kind of stuff needs to end. Email's are required to conduct business and interact with the govenrment nowadays. A private company should not be allowed to just remove your ability to interface with businesses online. My bank can't effectively steal all my money and close my accounts just because I have a personal viewpoint or hell, even committed a felony! But for some reason (especially redditors) people think it's okay for a private company to shut someone down entirely just because of some form of speech or whatever reason simply because it's a private entity.
The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.
People using search, gmail, drive etc aren’t the customers.
(Fortunately I haven’t been called a wog to my face in decades)
People who comment on Google's lack of human support ignore the fact that it's a virus that's engulfed the whole online world. Almost every large company has automated chatbots, voice response systems, FAQs, and every imaginable way to avoid paying human beings who know things. And let's not even talk about whether they're empowered to actually do things for you.
Google could certainly lead and maybe the rest of the world would have to follow. Maybe.
There has been a literal, yet largely silent, book burning going on with Google services in recent years. On youtube, many alternative voices are silenced, billions of comments deleted.
I know its a private company, but in the US there are free speech laws + the possibility of using the court system (if someone makes a libellous statement). But no, silencing voices is in the realms of corporate policy - the rule of law has been deemed to not apply.
Also, Google is not a private company.
I found a total of 3 that _hadn't_ been deleted.
Edit: it's not this ^^^
It's not like the government doesn't play a role. These platforms can only exist because of government protections, and those protections should come with protections to the public against censorship.
Do you ever imagine how unnerving it would be, if 99% of all online discourse in your country took place on platforms owned by foreign corporations?
Given that context, I thought it was clear I was talking about the nature of free speech laws in the USA.
To that end, free speech has been upheld against social media platforms in specific circumstances. Eg when Trump blocked people he didn’t like on Twitter.
I’ll get downvotes for saying this because it’s a popular meme on HN to shout “free speech” but most who argue it misunderstand the law and it’s important to understand what the law actually states if you want to make a complaint about business not abiding by it.
Personally I don’t think the problem is that platforms are legally allowed to censor the content they host. In fact I can think of some legitimate case studies for why a company should be allowed to moderate the content it hosts (eg if it’s a platform aimed at children). I think the real problem is a combination of:
- people repeatedly falling back to the same few hosting platforms for everything, this allows the impact of those company’s hosting terms to be far further reaching than it ever should be. Eg if you know your military studies might trigger Googles bot then don’t use Google!
- and the companies providing a broken escalation process. Meaning what should be a relatively simple review ends up taking a mammoth public campaign on yet another social network just to get a human to look at the case.
Point 1 is really the crux though. This is one domain where boycotting actually does make a difference. Granted not to Google’s financials, but it does make a difference to us. Because the best way to avoid shitty T&Cs is to use a service that doesn’t have shitty T&Cs. There’s no shortage of hosting platforms out there so it really is that simple.
Bake the cake.
To say they have no support is too generous. It is more like they have an aggressively anti-support model.
Sadly, it seems that this should be so well known as to be considered foolish to use Google (and many others) for anything critical.
Its is not like Google lacks the capital or organizational scale to provide good support - they just refuse to do so. If they actually did it, they could probably do an amazing job, but that is not their goal.
No one wants to deal with a company that can shut you down any moment for no good reason and with no way to resolve the situation. If they continue like that, their dominance may be slowly eroded by smaller companies that actually care for all of their customers. It won't happen overnight, but once the movement has gained momentum, it will be hard for a giant like Google to adjust.
Like Facebook and content moderation, it's a problem entirely of their own making. Zero sympathy, caveat emptor.
There have been a lot of WW2 fanboys who have been writing fawning articles about nazis who won a medal or two and were secretly, actually anti-Hitler the whole time. The reality, as far as documented, is that most of these were run of the mill soldiers without any known tendencies to be treasonous in wartime. She's been finding most of the heroics to be bullshit, and the real soldiers to be nobodies, and hence having the articles deleted per WP non-notable policy.
P.S. No, I'm not saying that Google is in the right.
> P.S. No, I'm not saying that Google is in the right.
You are, however, clearly saying they are not in the wrong...
I'm not sure that difference matters.
> I'm not sure that difference matters.
It does. Customers pay money. He is not a customer.
Where there is profitable trade both parties have certain responsibilities.
Personally I stopped using free services everywhere I can because of this legal vacuum leaving me exposed.
You do not have a say in what Google does with others - in fact others are paying Google so it is clearly that Google's services are valued by them.
Here's one of the first sentences of someone who pays money and is locked:
"I'm paying you money for X. I expect X to work"
Oh wait, I think that's even worse. This is the case for all google sites, if you use firefox, back button is disabled. Maybe this is to worsen the user experience for Firefox and encourage use of Chrome?
Maybe you have some scripts or addons.
By this I mean any problem I've had has been fixed. So at least Amazon has SOME humans still in the loop handling AWS support tickets and Amazon store calls.
I pay way less than $100/month
My evidence is as good as yours. Anecdotal.
I think the real lesson here is that you should backup your data. Simple as that.
The guy losing access to their Google account today is at fault just like the guy that lost all his data because his HD got burned a decade ago. It's just slightly easier to blame Google than to blame a faulty drive. But ultimately you are the one to blame.
Just backup your Google Drive to a S3 storage or equivalent. And maybe keep a local copy in an HD or optical media.
It really is as simple as that. People who have their only hard drive die experience the same. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"
Anyway, Google will never ever comment on the reason for account disabled in public, therefore whining about it in public is not going to work. The way to get accounts enabled is https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2
>Anyway, Google will never ever comment on the reason for account disabled in public, therefore whining about it in public is not going to work. The way to get accounts enabled is https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2
No, Google has proven itself to be a pretty awful enterprise and deserves no benefit of doubt.
There have been plenty of reports that this doesn't work either, with a bot simply 'reviewing' your account and not enabling it.
The OP is 'whining about it in public' because it's the only hope they have of getting a human being at google to notice the problem and save their data. If google had a functional support system that wasn't 100% bots, users wouldn't have to complain in public!
We actually do not care if Google comments or not, that is an internal policy decision for the time being. With legislation in Europe though I believe it will have to explain automated decisions and also will have to provide users with their content.
I am inclined to believe, btw, that someone who stored terrorism or other questionable material, would not be bold and stupid enough to make noise about losing access to it.
oh well, did you “dogfooded” your own human-review system once flagged by your anti-abuse bots ? Of course not, and that’s why your system suck. If your are/were working at google, you are part of the problem, and if you want to do something about it, you should come down from your ivory tower.
https://testing.googleblog.com/2014/01/the-google-test-and-d...